A week ago the chess world was riddled with a scandal of epic proportions. The accusations was that Niemann cheated on Magnus Carlsen, and somehow used chess computers when beating Magnus. Personally I don't think Niemann cheated, and I believe the fact that this is a scandal, and that people are discussing cheating, is the scandal. Anyways, the point is that having computer aided help when playing chess is not OK, since it's considered cheating. However, and I'm sorry for emphasising this into bold the way I do, but this is really, really important to understand ...

IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT YOU ARE FIRED FOR NOT CHEATING!

In software development you're allowed to cheat as much as you want to. In fact, if you have the opportunity to cheat and you don't cheat, most would be angry at you. This is because software development is not a competition about measuring how "clever" the software developer is. In fact, the abilities of the software developer is 100% completely irrelevant. The only thing that's important when you're developing software is how fast you can deliver a product, and how high quality products you are able to deliver.

If one of my devs had the opportunity to "cheat" and didn't cheat, I would fire them for NOT cheating! Simply because TIME IS MONEY!

If you've got a colleague and he can produce half as much working software as you can do in the same time, you have earned twice his salary - End of debate! Nothing more to say here really!

To illustrate the point let me tell you a story about a former colleague of mine. This was back in 2012, and the guy had been given a job as an external consultant on an outsourcing job. The task he was given was to create a CRUD app wrapping a single table database. The idea was to replace an Excel file with an online web app. My former colleague used the best tools available at his time, implemented the project in 10 hours, and billed the client 12,500 EUROs for the job.

That's a salary of 1,250 EUROs per hour in case you're not following me

Did the guy cheat? Nope! What he did was perfectly legitimate, because everybody else would have needed 100 hours to deliver the same. 12,500 EUROs divided by 100 becomes 125 EUROs per hour, which is a reasonable hourly rate for a software developer in Norway.

My former colleague's story inspired me to create a software system that automatically created software, realising nobody cares if you're "cheating" in software development. In fact, at Aista we're "cheating" all the time, and we're proud of it! We are using computer aided software generators all the time, allowing us to deliver in 5 minutes what most others would need 500 hours to deliver.

This results is that the end customer in need of software can choose if he wants to pay somebody else 500x125 EUROs for a job, becoming a price tag of 62,500 EUROs, or pay us 31,250 for the same job, realising we're making 375,000 EUROs per hour, because we're able to deliver the same product in 5 minutes instead of 500 hours.

The end customer gets the product for half the price, while we're invoicing 375,000 EUROs per hour, and still delivering outstanding quality, several orders of magnitudes higher than the competition.

And in fact, we're literally mass producing "cheating factories" all over the world these days. The 6th of September we created 3 companies in fact, on two different continents, who's purpose it is "to cheat as much as possible". With the stated purpose of saving the end customer's money, delivering outstanding quality, 100 times higher than everybody else can deliver, and deliver it a million times faster. You can check out one of our companies here. In case you think this is a joke, I beg you to watch the following YouTube video and reconsider ...

... because there's no joke coming! We are deadly serious! So here's the deal, either you start cheating too, or we will happily take your jobs ... ;)

Psst, in case you're a chess fan, and you want an epic quote ...

The code speaks for itself!